He picked himself to pieces

Anthony Thwaite reviews Collected Poems by Robert Lowell ed by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter

Robert Lowell (1917-77) was born into the Boston aristocracy - statesmen, executives, military officers, educationists - but from the beginning he did things his own way: escaping Harvard to go south (and there developing his idiosyncratic speaking voice, a weird blend of Boston Brahmin and Deep South), converting for a while to Catholicism, refusing the Army draft and going to jail.

From the beginning, too, he was a poet, publishing his first book in 1944. His second, Lord Weary's Castle, won a Pulitzer Prize two years later. He was praised by his powerful seniors (Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, T. S. Eliot) and by his brilliant and not easily hoodwinked contemporaries, such as Randall Jarrell.

What they found was something grand and ambitious, a rhetoric controlled by a massive shaping intellect: After the planes unloaded, we fell down Buried together, unmarried men and women; Not crown of thorns, nor iron, nor Lombard crown, Not grilled and spindled spires pointing to heaven Could save us. Raise us, Mother, we fell down Here hugger-mugger in the jellied fires Our sacred earth in our day was our curse.

(The Dead in Europe) But early on there were signs of mental instability - bouts of manic behaviour, and the first of a series of tortured relationships with women, fuelled by drink. Nevertheless, the writing of poems went on unchecked, and the praise continued. By the time he published Life Studies in 1959 Lowell was widely regarded as the greatest poet still active in the English-speaking world: Eliot and Pound were silent, Frost had become senile.

Life Studies was a collection that took a radically different turn. In abandoning the grandiose iambic tread of his previous work, Lowell seemed to be examining himself - his background, his ancestry, his darkest psychological corners - with scrupulous attention, using a much freer, conversational style. The manner soon acquired a label - "confessional poetry" - and for a time took root on both sides of the Atlantic. But it was not a label Lowell accepted.

Looking at himself in these poems, Lowell was also interrogating the world: not only his background and ancestry but the nation of which by a strange process, he had become the chief artistic and intellectual representative. In his next two books (For the Union Dead, 1964, and Near the Ocean, 1967) he stepped, or edged, into the spotlight by taking on the vexed matter of where the United States itself stood: Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heels of small war - until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime.

(Waking Early Sunday Morning) But within a few years, the commanding position Lowell had achieved, as his nation's eloquent and worrying conscience, began to falter. As his manic-depressive cycle speeded up (possibly exacerbated by a new regime of medication), he launched into a long sequence of 14-line poems, unrhymed sonnets: first Notebook, then History, then For Lizzie and Harriet, then The Dolphin.

In all of these, Lowell rummaged among episodes from history that had taken his fancy, from the Roman Empire to Hitler, and recycled bits and pieces of his copious correspondence. It was fascinating, in a way, but it was also distressing: a man picking himself and his obsessions to pieces.

He was, indeed, going to pieces - and yet the machine never stopped: the brilliant wayward mind went on evolving more and more discursive manoeuvres, throwing into the kaleidoscope all kinds of matter - personal, historical political, mythical: My sidestepping and obliquities, unable to take the obvious truth on any subject - why do I do what I do not want to say, able to understand and not to hear?

(On the End of the Phone) Rushing back from England to New York in an attempt to have a reconciliation with one of his ex-wives, he died in a taxi. After his death, and after a painstaking and painful biography by Ian Hamilton, Lowell's reputation ebbed away. Now, with this enormous Collected Poems, put together with diligence by two of his disciples, there is an attempt to reinstate him to his former glory.

Like some other poets (Yeats, Graves, Auden), Lowell was a great reviser and discarder; and this creates problems for his editors. Some things have to be tucked into appendices, others into Notes.

The whole of his first book, The Land of Unlikeness, which Lowell never allowed to be reprinted in his lifetime, is given its own appendix and turns out to be a lot more readable than much later Lowell. Almost 1,200 pages make for a doorstopper, and there were times, turning this book over in my hands, when I was brought low. Still, here it all is, at best magnificent and memorable, at worst prosily prattling to itself.

Anthony Thwaite edited Philip Larkin's 'Collected Poems'. His own 'A Move in the Weather' has just been published by Enitharmon.